Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
LYDIA
I don't sleep.
His text sits on my phone like a lit fuse.
Stephen:
Don't leave without seeing me first.
Don't leave without seeing me first. Not I love you. Not please stay. Not I'm sorry I said I need time when the woman in front of me was handing me everything I've ever wanted and all I had to do was take it.
Don't leave without seeing me first.
Like I'm a piece of equipment he forgot to return before the consultation ended.
That's not fair. I know it's not fair. I know Stephen Nelson well enough after two weeks to understand that the man who pushed me away in a dog kennel yesterday did it because he's terrified, not because he doesn't care.
He loves me. I saw it in his face every morning when he handed me coffee.
I felt it in his hands every night in his bed.
I heard it in the way he said my name, low and rough, like the word itself was something precious he was trying to hold without crushing.
He loves me and he's afraid to say it because the last time he loved someone enough to fight the water for them, two people drowned.
Scout lifts her head at five-thirty when the first gray light seeps through the curtains.
I drag myself to the shower. Stand under the hot water with my forehead against the tile and let myself feel all of it.
The loss. The anger. The desperate, clawing hope that his text means something more than goodbye.
I get dressed. Jeans. My own shirt this time, because his flannel is hanging in his cabin and I don't have access to the armor I've been wearing against my skin for two weeks. I braid my hair. Feed Scout from the travel bag.
My phone buzzes at six-fifteen.
Stephen:
I'm at the trailhead by the old ranger station. Bring Scout.
Not the cabin. The trailhead. I frown at the screen.
Me:
I have a flight at 2.
Stephen:
You'll make it. Trust me.
Trust me. From the man who told me yesterday he doesn't know how to stand next to someone without saving them.
I load Scout into the car and drive.
The trailhead at the old ranger station is two miles north of town, a gravel pullout at the base of a trail that cuts through pine forest toward the waterfall that Nash Carter once told me is the most beautiful spot in Grizzly Ridge.
I've never been. Stephen never took me. It occurs to me now, pulling into the lot beside his truck, that he's been avoiding this trail because of where it leads.
Water.
He's standing at the trailhead marker. Dark jeans, boots, a gray thermal pushed up to his forearms. His hair is uncombed and his jaw is tight, and he's got something in his hand.
A pack. His rescue pack, the orange one I've seen hanging in the supply shed.
The one with the rope and the harness and the emergency equipment that he carries on every deployment.
Scout jumps out and trots to Duke, who's waiting at Stephen's heel. The two dogs greet each other with a brief nose touch and settle.
I stop six feet from him. The same distance I maintained the first day we met.
"What's this?" I ask.
"A grand gesture." His voice is rough. Wrecked.
Like he's been awake all night too. "It's going to be a bad one because I don't know how to do them, and the only model I've got is Drew Briggs, who built an entire youth center, and Logan Creed, who literally married Erica the night he met her.
So the bar is unreasonable and I'm going to fall short, but I'm here and I'm trying. "
My breath catches. He shifts the pack on his shoulder and looks at me with those sea-green eyes that are lighter this morning, almost blue, the color of shallow water in sunlight.
"Walk with me," he says.
We walk.
The trail climbs through dense pine, the morning light filtering in shafts through the canopy. Stephen walks ahead, setting the pace. Not fast, not slow. Deliberate. Like every step is a decision he's making consciously. Scout and Duke range ahead, noses working the damp earth.
We don't talk. The silence isn't hostile. It's the silence of a man gathering the words he needs, and I've spent my career waiting for frightened creatures to find their voice. I can wait for this one.
The trail opens after a quarter mile, and I hear it before I see it.
Water.
Not a gentle trickle. A full cascade pouring down a granite face into a pool fifteen feet across, ringed with moss-covered boulders and fed by snowmelt from above. The sound fills the clearing. Rushing, constant, alive.
Stephen stops at the edge of the pool.
His body goes rigid. I watch it happen in real time. The locked shoulders, the clenched jaw, the way his hands ball into fists at his sides. His chest expands with a breath that shudders going in.
"I haven't been here," he says without turning around. "Four years in Grizzly Ridge and I've never walked this trail because I knew what was at the end of it."
"Stephen."
"Let me finish." He turns. Faces me with the waterfall behind him, and the mist from the cascade catches the light and halos him in silver.
"I stayed up all night trying to figure out what to say to you.
I wrote things down and crossed them out and started over, and none of it was right because the right words for what you are to me don't exist in any language I speak. "
My chest aches. Deep and expanding.
"So I decided to stop talking and start showing.
" He shrugs the pack off his shoulder and sets it on the ground.
Then he sits on the boulder nearest the pool and begins unlacing his boots.
"You told me yesterday that you don't need a rescue swimmer.
You need a partner. And a partner doesn't stand on the shore. "
He pulls off his boots. His socks. He stands barefoot on the cold granite and looks at the water.
"Stephen, you don't have to do this."
"Yeah, I do." He meets my eyes. "Because this is the thing.
This is the wall. I can't promise you a future while I'm still running from water.
I can't ask you to build a life with me on a mountain where I can't even walk past a waterfall without hearing people drown.
" He steps to the edge of the pool. His toes curl over the rock.
"So I'm going in. And I need you to talk me through it. "
Tears blur my vision. I blink them back because I need to see him. Every second of this.
"Like you'd talk a dog through a threshold exercise," he says, and the ghost of a smile crosses his face. "Bring me below threshold. Keep me there. Help me build the association."
He steps into the water.
It's shallow at the edge. Ankle deep. Cold enough that I see the shock ripple through his body, see his hands clench, see his chin drop to his chest. But he doesn't retreat.
"Talk to me," he says.
I move to the edge of the pool. Crouch on the rock. My voice comes out steady and warm, the same voice I use with Scout, with Koda, with every broken creature I've ever loved back to life.
"You're safe. The water is six inches deep where you're standing. The bottom is solid granite. There's no current. No swell. No undertow."
He takes another step. The water climbs to his shins. His breathing goes fast and shallow, and I can see the pulse hammering in his throat.
"I hear them," he whispers. "Thomas calling for help. Caleb screaming."
"That's a memory. It's not here. What's here is cold water and morning light and me." I extend my hand across the surface. My fingers hover above the water. "Come to me."
He wades forward. Step by step. The water reaches his knees, then his thighs. His jeans darken. His whole body trembles. But his eyes are locked on mine, and with each step the trembling lessens, and the breathing slows, and the rigid terror in his jaw begins to ease.
He reaches me. Takes my hand. His grip is crushing, his fingers ice-cold and shaking, and I hold on with everything I have.
"You're here," I say. "You're standing in water and you're here."
"I'm here." His voice cracks. His free hand comes up and cups my face, wet fingers against my cheek, and the cold of the water and the heat of his palm create a contrast that sends shivers racing across my skin. "I'm here, and I'm not running."
"I know you're not."
"I love you." He says it like a dam breaking.
Like the words have been backed up behind something massive and the structure just gave way.
"I love you, Lydia. I love the way you read every room you walk into.
I love the way you talk to dogs like they're people who just need the right person to listen.
I love that you wore my flannel every day and you fight for animals who can't fight for themselves and you looked at me like I was worth saving when I'd given up on that a long time ago. "
I'm crying. Not subtle, dignified tears. The ugly kind. The kind that come from a place so deep you didn't know it existed until someone cracked it open.
"I'm coming with you," he says. "To New Hampshire. To the deposition. To wherever the hell you need to go. And then we're coming back here, to this mountain, and you're moving into my cabin, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life being the partner you asked for."
"You can't just decide that."
"I already decided. I decided at midnight sitting on my porch holding your flannel and realizing that my cabin smells like you and my bed is empty without you and I don't want another night where I'm not falling asleep with your hair in my face and your dog taking up half the mattress."
A sob-laugh erupts from my chest. "Scout doesn't take up half the mattress."
"Scout takes up exactly half the mattress and you know it and I don't care because she's yours and you're mine and the whole package deal is the best thing that ever walked onto my sixty acres." He pulls me off the rock.